We all know beavers are blamed for everything. For floods and droughts and giardiasis and crop failure. Well if you have even one friend who knows you like beavers you received a panicked copy of some version of this article yesterday. Because apparently they cause climate change too.
The Newest Threat to a Warming Alaskan Arctic: Beavers
The large rodents are creating lakes that accelerate the thawing of frozen soils and potentially increase greenhouse gas emissions, a study finds.
Alaskan beavers are carving out a growing web of channels, dams and ponds in the frozen Arctic tundra of northwestern Alaska, helping to turn it into a soggy sponge that intensifies global warming.
On the Baldwin Peninsula, near Kotzebue, for example, the big rodents have been so busy that they’re hastening the regional thawing of the permafrost, raising new concerns about how fast those organic frozen soils will melt and release long-trapped greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, said scientists who are studying the beavers’ activity.
The number of new beaver dams and lakes continues to grow exponentially, suggesting that “beavers are a greater influence than climate on surface water extent,” said University of Alaska, Fairbanks scientist Ken Tape, a co-author of a new beaver and permafrost study published today in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
Those rotten beavers. Always going where they’re not wanted. If they weren’t there the permafrost would be melting much slower and we could keep right on pretending climate change wasn’t real!
The bigger and deeper the pools made by the beavers, the warmer the water. The larger pools hold heat longer, which delays refreezing in autumn. Tape said Arctic vegetation, permafrost, hydrology and wildlife are all linked. Even against the backdrop of other recent Arctic global warming extremes, like raging wildfires, record heat waves and dwindling glaciers and sea ice, the impact of beavers stands out, he said.
“It’s not gradual change,” he said. “It’s like hitting the landscape with a hammer.”
“And it’s a continual change that the Arctic is just not used to,” he added.
Ooof! Hitting the artic landscape with a hammer! Good lord what a vivid image. Don’t you just hate those rotten beavers. What happens to the ruined landscape after they work their nasty will? Does it just sit there with those ponds festering?
No it does not.
Another way to see them is as “agents of Arctic adaptation,” said Ben Goldfarb, author of a recent natural history book that shows how beavers could help many other species, including humans, survive the era of rapid, human-caused climate change.
“Beavers create fantastic habitat for all kinds of species, like songbirds and moose,” Goldfarb said. “All of those species are moving northward because of climate change, and beavers are preparing the way.” As a habitat-creating keystone species, beavers are also important food for wolves, and recent research shows that beaver ponds are good at keeping carbon locked up, he added.
Beavers may even hold the key to survival for some salmon species that are losing their streams to global warming and other changes farther south.
“We’re losing salmon in other places. If they’re going to shift their climate envelope, they’re probably going to need beavers to help them,” Goldfarb said.
Thank god for Ben. What would we ever do without him? I just want to fire him at these articles like a water canon and hope he puts the stupid out. He won’t of course. You know that someone somewhere is going to propose we just KILL all the beavers and problem solved, no more CLIMATE CHANGE!
If beavers are the primary drivers of permafrost degradation on the Baldwin Peninsula, that has wider implications for tracking surface area changes across similar parts of the Arctic where beavers may advance, he said.
In lowland Arctic regions, the basins favored by beavers can account for 50 to 80 percent of the landscape. Currently, more than 10,000 beaver dams have been mapped across northwestern Alaska and that data is being used in models to pinpoint the impacts of the new water bodies on permafrost and the carbon cycle.
Permafrost researcher Merrit Turetsky, director of the University of Colorado, Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, said it’s not yet clear how beaver impacts may affect regional-scale carbon cycles, but that it’s ” important to pay attention to all ecosystem-engineers such as the beaver.”
Yeah yeah yeah. Those darn carbon based beavers. WIth their greenhouses gasses ruining everything. Here’s what Emily Fairfax had to say about this research.
Really frustrated to read this CNN article and the study that it is based on. Seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what beaver ponds are and are not. They are not the same as big arctic lakes. The study includes no actual measurements of permafrost degradation.
It’s 100% possible, and likely, that large beaver ponds that are not freezing thru in winter are accelerating permafrost degradation. I’m not arguing w/ that. Degradation happens when water bodies don’t freeze thru in winter & keep relatively warm water on the land surface. 2/n
But the study doesn’t measure pond depth. Or dam height. Or actual changes in permafrost structure/hydrology. They just measure number of beaver dams and pond surface area over time. They accurately showed that beavers are moving into the arctic. 3/n
But it doesn’t show how many of those ponds are staying unfrozen year round. Primary dams tend to be taller than secondary dams, and time to freeze thru depends on water depth. Beavers don’t want their primary pond freezing, but are less concerned with secondary ponds. 4/n
In a typical landscape, 80-85% of dams are going to be secondary dams. Shorter dams. Shallower ponds. These will probably freeze thru in the high arctic! There are simple 1D models for lake ice thickness to see how long it takes to freeze to a given depth for a given climate.
Of course there are no measurements. This entire study is speculation by satellite. They don’t want to get their boots all mucky. But here’s one final parting thought from Emily.
Know what releases a huge amount of greenhouse gasses? Wildfire in the arctic. Maybe the beavers are helping by keeping the ground wet even during summer. Maybe not. We don’t know without collecting the relevant data.
Sure humans are causing climate change and ruining the permafrost. But beavers are making it faster! Now the BP trucks can’t even drive across the tundra three months of the year! How can they keep making money hand over fist? I ask you.
One day in 2016, Brittany, along with her sister, her niece, and her mom, took Zach on a final field trip. A lifelong animal lover, Zach had a special thing for turtles; he even owned a painted turtle, a female named Gary, that their sister brought back once from Myrtle Beach. (It’s still alive today, in the care of their mother). Zach’s dying wish was to visit Moss Lake, a turtle hotspot. “I can remember trying to get him in the car — it was so tragic but so funny,” said Brittany, who has a gift for smiling through pain. “It’s horrible because he’s dying, he can’t move. But at the same time, we’re all laughing because his gut is hanging out, he’s swearing, there’s a cigarette coming out of his mouth, his catheter is falling out of his pocket.” Alas, the turtles weren’t out, but it was still a lovely afternoon. In a photo Brittany sent me from that day, Zach sits flanked by his family, five backs to the camera, their arms twined around each other’s shoulders, the dark timber across the lake reflected in the water’s silver bowl.
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